Some Theological Implications of Panpsychism

God as World-Mind: Some Theological Implications of Panpsychism David Skrbina Perhaps the two most important concepts in the history of philosophy are God and mind. Unsurprisingly, both are notoriously vague, which is a large part of the reason why there has been such a diversity of views on these topics. Needless to say, the literature on each is vast. Less examined, though, is the intersection of these two concepts. ›God as mind‹; ›mind as God‹—what can these mean? What do they imply? How can such hybrid concepts be articulated and integrated into the current stream of philosophic thought? These are the questions that I will explore in the present essay. Ultimately I will argue that the most reasonable conception of God is that of a world-mind—the mind of the cosmos—in a sense that is completely analogous to the mind of a human being. These questions will be examined in light of two other over-arching concepts: panpsychism and panentheism. Rather than analyzing these in terms of their various and subtle forms, I will address each in a relatively broad and loose conception. Panpsychism I take to be the view that all objects, or systems of objects, have, or contain, aspects of mind. Panentheism I take to be the view that God resides ›in‹ the universe as its spirit or soul. Both of these require some discussion before moving on to the primary subject at hand. First, panpsychism: This is an ancient and respected metaphysical view, dating to the earliest days of Western philosophy. It almost certainly derives from even older pre-rational animistic traditions, which became formalized in the language and concepts of true philosophy. Primitive peoples seemed to have had an instinctive awareness that the world of nature was suffused with agency, potency, experientiality, and will. Non-human life forms clearly worked toward desired ends in a deliberate and quasi-conscious manner. They clearly experienced the world; they could flourish and be happy; they could suffer and perish. Indigenous people, seeing themselves as fully integrated into nature and not yet as a thing apart, would certainly have viewed other animals as fully enminded. Plants, as living and growing things, also would have undoubted- ly been imbued with agency and spirit. And lacking any scientific notion of life, non-living things that exhibited power, motive force, or even patterned behavior would also have been assumed to possess something like a spirit or © David Skrbina, 2020 | doi:10.30965/9783957437303_006 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.David Skrbina - 9783957437303 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 03:09:07AM via free access 92 David Skrbina soul, on a par with plants and animals. For our distant ancestors, all the world was alive. As philosophy emerged, this ancient animistic intuition became subject to rational analysis—and thus transformed in the process. For the Greeks, the power to cause motion, or of self-motion, was a clear marker of an innate psyche. For Thales, even the humble magnetic rock was ensouled because it could move bits of iron. For others, the rational and orderly movement of ce- lestial bodies was proof of ensoulment. Yet others saw elemental forces like fire and air as evidence of a universal psychic power. Even change itself, ubiquitous in nature, was seen as something god-like and divine—evidence of reason in nature. Over time, arguments for panpsychism evolved in form and complexity, but never faded away. Some philosophers argued on a basis of ex nihilo, nihil fit: nothing in the effect that is not in the cause. If ensouled animals and plants could arise from mere matter, then mere matter must be ensouled. Some argued from a theological basis; if God made all and is, in some sense, extant in all things, then mind or spirit must be omnipresent. Other philosophers took cues from scientific reasoning. For example, the dynamic sensitivity of even the simplest forms of matter suggests an inherent experientiality. Yet others said that the physical manifestation of things is simply their exterior; they must also have an interior, and the best candidate for such an interior is something mind-like. Present-day arguments are more sophisticated but draw on the same basic intuitions. We now have Russellian (in reality, Schopenhauerian) monism, analytical non-emergence arguments, process-based approaches, and a priori claims based on quasi-idealist views. Some current forms of panpsychism em- phasize the mentality, consciousness, or experientiality of all (or at least some) elementary particles or ultimate entities. This is a necessary but not sufficient condition, however, because we are also compelled to accept our own enmind- edness. Those who promote variations on such a micro-psychism paint for us a strange cosmos, one in which (say) atoms, humans, and perhaps ›higher animals‹ are experiential beings—and nothing else. An odd universe, to say the least. Far more likely, and more in line with historical thinking, is to argue that all physical objects, and perhaps all systems of objects, have an experiential unity or aspect. For present purposes, I will defend panpsychism in this latter sense: as a broadly conceived notion that all things have an experiential unity, a mind. Regarding panentheism, we can date the origin of the term to the early 1800s in the work of Karl Krause, a relatively minor German philosopher who David Skrbina - 9783957437303 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 03:09:07AM via free access God as World-Mind: Some Theological Implications of Panpsychism 93 studied under Schelling and Hegel.1 Krause held an organismic view of the universe, one in which God was, in effect, the soul of the physical cosmos. An omnipresent God saturated all aspects of the physical world—just as water might saturate a sponge—but remained ontologically distinct. The water is not the sponge, and God is not the universe, as pantheism would have it. Panentheism attempts to retain something of a theological God while naturalizing him; he is no supernatural being, dwelling in some otherworldly heaven.2 Krause’s was an attempt to construct a modern, scientific, and naturalistic cosmos without abandoning God. But from a present-day perspective we can see some immediate problems here. If a panentheistic God is ontologically distinct from the physical realm, we are dealing with a form of dualism. And if this God has any causal power in the world, or reacts in any way to our pleadings, we are directly faced with the severe problem of interactionism—of how a non-physical God can causally interact with physical beings or a physical universe. We are furthermore con- fronted with the striking lack of evidence; if such a God exists, why is he not transparently obvious to all? On the contrary, he is defended by a vanishingly small portion of humanity.3 Additionally, we need to inquire whether a panentheistic God is anything like the Christian God: specifically, one who is good, just, merciful, and loving. Any such moral God immediately runs afoul of the Problem of Evil: why would any all-powerful and all-good deity allow rampant pain and suffering? This problem has long been recognized to have no cogent reply. Responses such as Plantinga’s—that for God to banish evil, he would also have to banish free will—are only marginally relevant. First, it addresses only logical, not metaphysical, necessity. Second, it’s irrelevant for natural evil (hurricanes, tsunamis, etc) and for evil suffered by sentient but non-human animals. Third, it holds a naïvely realist view of free will, one that is arguably unjustified. For these reasons, any conventional panentheism is untenable. But there remains a valid intuition here, I think: that there exists some kind of higher-order consciousness or mind in the universe. This, in fact, may be the one valid belief behind virtually every religion known to man. It has seemed plausible, even obvious, to many people over the millennia that some sort of Mind (or Minds) are at work in the cosmos. Given a vague analogy to the 1 For a good exploration of Krause’s views, see Göcke 2018. 2 For sake of convenience, I will refer to God in terms of male pronouns; but this is not in- tended literally, of course. (To be politically correct, perhaps I should use a gender-neutral pronoun like ›zie.‹ But I won’t.) 3 There are no panentheistic religions, to my knowledge. David Skrbina - 9783957437303 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 03:09:07AM via free access 94 David Skrbina human mind, it’s natural to project anthropomorphic qualities onto this Mind. And even this has some rational basis, as I will argue. But to turn the Big Mind into an all-good, all-powerful God who loves each and every one of us, answers prayers, sends sinners to hell, etc—this won’t do at all. What we need, then, is a naturalistic theology without the religion: a logos of theos (rationality about God) without the ›binding‹ (re-ligio, lit. to bind). I hope to make some progress along this path in the present essay. 1. The Greek Context Having sketched some cursory thoughts on panpsychism, panentheism, God, and mind, I’d like to start to synthesize these concepts into a viable and naturalistic theology. Unsurprisingly, many important ideas on this front were first articulated by the Greeks. Let’s remind ourselves what they said on these topics. The pre-Socratics seemed quite convinced that the cosmos as a whole was ensouled in some way.

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